Smart Cities

When you live in a capital it's easy to complain about the big things that are broken, but since visiting all these Second Cities, I'm excited for them in a way I'm not about London. Second Cities will have to figure out how to best harness what they have and keep people loving what's great about them.

Making the City Playable conference in September and will run for two months. From now and until then we will work with the creators to question, explore and make the most engaging, surprising, thoughtful project we can. I love how much this project moves on the notion of a Playable City and look forward to demonstrating again that playful city interventions can be more than just fun.

Smart Cities are hot news with many examples where innovation and technology have been drivers of growth and sustainability. But are Smart Cities heading for an 'Uncanny Valley' where the lack of consultation with citizens can lead to alienation and rejection by the very people that these initiatives are designed to help?

Ultimately, a dependable infrastructure and technology-focused approach are vital foundations upon which a megacity will build itself, which could prove critical to a nation's economy and GDP. Without the infrastructure or technology, the potential for GDP growth may be limited.

Machine intelligence is coming to drive us. This robotics-science technology will not arrive unannounced in our cars. We will not overnight have no need to learn to drive. Its just that we won't have to be driving all the time in all places.

Traffic is too heavy. Rush hour is too long. Highways are too narrow and byways too slight. Our roads are congested, backed-up, over-crowded, and bumper to crash-proof bumper... The urban environment as we once knew it is gone.

We watch them, drive them, make phone calls on them and even live in them. Everything today, it seems, is smart. TVs, cars, phones and cities all carry the prefix to display their clever credentials. And next week, with the launch of the new iPhone 5S, another product will be added to the long list of smart.

The Smart City idea attracts hype and scepticism in dynamic balance; but it's a boring kind of balance. As something of a bystander until now and as an architect and citizen, I will attempt here to sieve out the essence of smart.

The scale and pace of urban development is startling. Allowing for a world population of nine billion people by 2050, every single new person on the planet will be accounted for in a city somewhere - that's eight new Londons a year for the next 40 years.

Many people will have heard the Government and tech experts talking about the concept of connected cities. £100million in public spending has been set aside under the Urban Broadband Fund as part of a commitment to making high speed broadband available to everyone in the UK

Many see a smart city as one where a network of sensors brings together data to be analysed for the more effective management of its systems. Yet this alone will not solve a city's problems of finance, sustainability and the protection of its citizen's health, security and wellbeing, writes Felicia Jackson.